No animal except Homo sapiens has any choice in what life to live. Having a vastly richer interior life, we humans must struggle to find an excellent way of living, and we must recognize the most fundamental principle of human life: By nature every person is meant to love and be loved. I don’t know about [...]
So long as the government continues subsidizing radical groupthink through its tax, research, and other policies, we will continue to see our children indoctrinated into an ideology that denies reality, precludes self-awareness, and undermines ordered liberty… The Organization of American Historians (OAH) has responded to the Trump presidency in a manner showing all the seriousness [...]
Such textbooks as the one I found would be drummed out of today’s schools, where children are taught to be embarrassed by piety, honor, purity, and faith. I am musing upon a fine book written by a teacher and prolific author, Leroy Armstrong. He is introducing the reader to the life and the work of [...]
Most Western academics today are using their intellectual capital to answer questions that nobody’s asking on pages that nobody’s reading… Professors usually spend about three-six months (sometimes longer) researching and writing in order to submit a twenty-five-page article to an academic journal. And most experience a twinge of excitement when, months later, they open a letter informing [...]
We want to give our students a classroom in which inciting books are talked about not as mere literature nor as historical documents, but boldly as they meant themselves to be taken: as the Word of God, or the insight of the intellect, or the wisdom of the world. And yet we want these same [...]
Without a major autodidactic push to learn the classic works that formed our civilization, the West’s storehouse of knowledge is in serious danger of becoming nothing more than an artifact... In one of my favorite scenes from the movie Seven, Morgan Freeman’s character gets a guard to let him into a library late at night [...]
The lack of schooling in the formation of one of every four U.S. presidents underscores the paradox that even the most humble among them were often great champions of education in general and of the liberal arts in particular… Can the liberal arts prepare citizens for leadership? Most of us in higher education want the [...]
Today’s offering in our Timeless Essay series affords readers the opportunity to join Robert C. Koons, as he explores the ways in which we may reform the higher education system. —W. Winston Elliott III, Publisher The “higher education system” in the United States has metastasized to the point that the body politic will soon be unable [...]
This summer I taught a week-long music course for high school students. As the week progressed, I brought in samples of music to listen to, pieces by Bach or Beethoven, Mozart or Palestrina, that would illustrate this or that aspect of what we were reading and discussing. Although a few of the students had clearly been [...]
I have always sought to instill into my students that a knowledge of literature is not possible without an adequate knowledge of history, philosophy, and theology. I stress, for instance, that we cannot know the plays of Shakespeare unless we know something about the time and culture in which he was living and the philosophical [...]
Dwelling on Delphi: Thinking Christianly about the Liberal Arts, by Robert Woods (Westbow Press, 2016) We live in a curious moment in Western history. Despite the past few decades’ real technological and material advances, which the overwhelming majority of us enjoy, most of us feel that something is seriously wrong. Smart phones and spectator sports have [...]
For some years now, there has been a genial quarrel between those who use e-readers like Nook and Kindle and those who prefer real books with actual pages. John Senior, if he were alive today, would undoubtedly denounce my Kindle. Dr. Senior was the most prominent of the founders of the Integrated Humanities Program at [...]
The purpose of university education is not meant to be therapeutic but formative. The university should concerned with the pursuit of truth and should mark a farewell to childhood and childish things. The recent antics at the nation’s universities have led people to expect almost anything from academia. There are safe spaces that resemble adult [...]
American businessmen are inhumane. I do not mean that they are inhuman; they are all too human. I do not mean that they are insufficiently humanitarian. I mean that American businessmen, like most other Americans, are deficient in the disciplines that nurture the spirit. They are largely ignorant of the humanities, which, in a word, [...]